Detlev James Foth is a German painter and draftsman whose work moves between expressive figuration and near-abstraction. He trained at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf beginning in 1979, and has lived and worked in Düsseldorf for most of the time since then; his career dates from collaborations in the late 1970s and a first solo show while still a student. 

Foth’s academic formation placed him in a lively, materially engaged generation: his teachers at the Düsseldorf academy included Luise Kimme, Bernhard Lüthi, Walter Biemel and the sculptor Tony Cragg, and he later took part in the master classes of Rissa (Karen Martin). This institutional lineage, part craft-oriented, part conceptual, informs the way his work balances bodily immediacy with formal experiment. 

Early in his career Foth worked with the Düsseldorf sculptor Kurt Link, and by his second year in the academy was showing abroad, an solo exhibition in Palma de Mallorca. Invitations from the German Foreign Office arranged solo presentations in São Paulo, and a notable first German solo at the Instituto Camões in Luanda; a solo in Cairo in 2012 further confirmed his international visibility.

Stylistically, Foth’s work is marked by a muscular facture and a wide chromatic range. He works across oil painting, drawing, collage, and occasionally sculpture, but it is his oil on canvas – often thick, tactile, and saturated – that most clearly demonstrates his interests. His paper works and collages, by contrast, expose a more linear and fragile sensibility that complements the paintings’ physicality. 

Throughout his career Detlev Foth has repeatedly returned to the naked body as a central subject, both singly in paintings and drawings of female models (sometimes including himself), and also in scenes of sexual and sensual encounter. When working on his large paintings of naked bodies he often likes to work naked himself, a real commitment to both subject and the work in progress.

Detlev Foth’s website (in German) can be found here.

We are very grateful to our Russian friend Yuri for introducing us to this artist, and for providing many of the images.